Mojo - June 2007

Tory Bowen of Nebraska says that she was raped, but testifying in court is a little difficult because the judge, Jeffre Cheuvront, has instructed her that neither she nor the prosecutors can use the following words: "rape," "sexual assault," "victim," assailant," "sexual assault kit." The words were banned at the request of defense attorneys, who also wanted the words "sex" and "intercourse" banned, but the judge did not go that far, presumably because the trial would then have been reduced to a game of charades. The jury will not be informed that the words have been banned.

This is the second time around for the accused, Pamir Safi. His first trial resulted in a hung jury when jurors deadlocked, 7-5. The banned words were in place at that trial, too.

Apparently, rape defense lawyers throughout the country are asking that the word "rape" not be used by the alleged victim and the prosecutor. This made me wonder whether anyone had asked an alleged armed robbery victim not to use the words "steal," "rob," and "gun." Or whether a witness to a murder has been barred from saying "murder," "kill," or "dead." I'm guessing the answer is no. Indeed, law professor Wendy Murphy of the New England School of Law says that "that is a profoundly unfair thing for a judge to do. I have a problem with the idea that you can compel a witness to contrive their testimony. I have a problem (with a judge) directing a witness, not the government, to say certain words. It impugns their candor, their credibility."

And, Murphy added, Bowen won't be able to explain to jurors why she's using clinical words--or, worse, words that imply consent--when she describes the encounter with Safi.

The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the president and the v. president of the Senate today for information related to the warrantless wiretapping program. The subpoena is a result of the ever-expanding examination of what the hell is wrong with Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department. I'm all but certain it won't unearth anything of value, but there's a lesson in it, nonetheless: If you're going to stretch the boundaries of the law, you have be competent enough not to beg for an investigation. In other words, the Bush administration might have gotten away with its attempt to stretch the law so aggressively that a handful of officials threatened to resign if there hadn't been a sh-t show so big that everybody and his dad got a chance to air their grievances before the Senate and the American public. On the other hand, the word impeachment remains strangely absent from Democratic discourse, so maybe you can have your cake and eat it, messily, while also throwing stones from your glass house. See what I'm sayin'?

"Every year we ask each other what periodicals we've been reading, and then we ask you. Every year we argue about what makes a good magazine and why we rush to pick up certain titles or swipe them from a neighbor's desk. We urge each other to try something new, and we smack our foreheads when a title bubbles up that we'd completely missed."

"...Mother Jones. As well-written, at its best, as anything out there (check out the story on the guy who gets 60 miles per gallon in a plain old Honda Accord), Mother Jones is a lot better than we remembered. Unabashedly liberal but more entertaining than the Nation and journalistically oriented but more passionate than the news weeklies, it fills a need we didn't know we had."

They like us, they really, really like us! We're one of only six mags given a shout-out in
the news/business/point of view category. And if you're into who got dissedand there are some most notable exceptionsI've pasted the whole list in after the jump.

Dick Cheney has claimed that his office is not subject to National Security Archives oversight of its handling of classified information because the vice president, as president of the Senate, is not part of the executive branch. Yet, to avoid public scrutiny of his meetings with energy industry leaders, Cheney declared that going public "would unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the executive branch." Question 1: Does this contempt for the constitution violate Cheney's promise to uphold the same document?

Cheney apparently considers himself his own special branch of government, outside the requirements of democracyand perversely, he may just have a point. The report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (more here) reveals that outsourcing of government responsibilities to private contractors is "the fastest growing component of federal discretionary spending." And Halliburton, the company Cheney once led and from which he continues to receive payment, has taken the lion's share of the growing business. Halliburton saw a six-fold increase in its income from government contracts under the VPerr, Senate President's watch. Question 2: Is this ethical?

So maybe the Dark Lord's ultimate agenda is simply personal greed. ThinkProgress points out that Cheney's stock options are worth more than 300 times more now than they were at the start of his second term. By contrast, the taxpayers have not profited from the arrangement. The House report concludes that 118 contractsworth $745.5 billion"experienced significant overcharges, wasteful spending, or mismanagement." Question 3: How is this not impeachable?

I've enjoyed reading the insightful blogger responses to Mother Jones' "Fight Different" package on internet politics. I've also enjoyed the less insightful ones. I was particularly entertained by this morning's post on Techpresident, which is (usually) a smart group blog on everything politics 2.0. Techprez blogger Alan Rosenblatt has decided today that the mainstream media is too obsessed with his ilk (if he's flattered, it doesn't show) and that they're failing to look more broadly at "how the web is playing an enormous role in all aspects of politics." Singled out for specific calumny is our very own bastion of old thinking:

[A]fter reading so much mainstream press coverage about Politics 2.0 lately (for example, in Mother Jones this month), one might conclude that the sun rises and sets only on blogs and the bloggers that write them. There is so much more to online campaigning that we do ourselves a great disservice when we narrow our focus too much on blogs.

If Alan had actually read the package, he'd see one story on bloggers out of four main pieces and 27 published interviews with netizens, digerati and politicos. Here's what Alan says Mother Jones is missing, which, since he's too lazy to look for himself, I've conveniently linked to stories in the package that deal with each subject: "the web is playing an enormous role in all aspects of politics, including fundraising, volunteer organizing, message dissemination, and voter engagement through social networks and social media." That's brilliant, Alan. Thanks for letting us know.

The most interesting thing about the Techpresident post is how it illustrates the blogosphere as echo chamber. Some bloggers earn their soup by setting up the old media as a paper doll to be burned, which works fine as long as nobody reads the old media to see what they're actually saying and nobody in the old media reads the blogs and bothers to debunk them when they're wrong. Fortunately, I see some light at the end of the tunnel here. For one, Mother Jones has a blog (hi, Alan!) and we can tinkle on logos just like the Calvinists.

All of this is not to say that Techpresident is a lame blog. I'm glad that Techprez blogger Cfinnie linked to my interview with Howard Dean (thanks, Cfinnie!). Too bad Alan doesn't read his colleagues either.

PS: I want to include a link to the blog of Seth Finkelstein, who is quite well-informed about many of the same issues we are discussing here and in the blog post on Rosen. I highly suggest following the links he's pasted into the comments below, and in his post. Also see our post from Dan Schulman for discussion about gatekeepers.

Yesterday a Louisiana House bill that would criminalize so-called partial-birth abortions passed 104-0. Never mind that there is no such thing as partial-birth abortion, it is still mentioned by name 18 times in the three-page bill. If passed, the law will allow the sentencing of doctors who perform abortions to up to 10 years of "hard labor" and a fine of up to $100,000 (which actually seems low; why not really go for broke and slam them with million-dollar fines?). The bill would also allow the mother, father, or maternal grandparents if the woman is underage to sue the doctor for damages.

The bill makes an exception for cases where a mother's life is threatened (but not for cases of rape and incest), which is often precisely when doctors use the technique, usually in later-term abortions, of removing a fetus from the uterus whole to avoid harm during extraction.

This is a ban on 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions without saying as much, but it also eliminates a type of procedure that could save a woman's life at any point in her pregnancy. Does it fly in the face of Roe? Sure, but such bills are du jour: Already, 31 states ban the procedure, and now Louisiana is upping the ante, ensuring that women in their recovering state will have to search far and wide to find an abortion doctor willing to help them.

At the risk of dating myself, back in 1988, when I was close to graduating from college, the average THC level in pot was 3.5 percent. And today? Well today the government says it's 8.5 percent, which is up from 7 percent in 2003. And if I scored some weed in Oregon, it's possible that I'd be buying pot that has a THC level of 33.12 percent. Clearly, as Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), scolds us, "we are not talking about the drug of the 1960s and 1970s this is Pot 2.0."

As The Drug War Chronicle's Scott Morgan notes, this increase is a far cry from drug czar John Walters' 2002 claim that "the potency of available marijuana has not merely 'doubled,' but increased as much as 30 times"a ratio that could not possibly hold true unless you were comparing the most potent marijuana money can buy to nonpsychoactive ditchweed.

Clearly, Nick Gillespe and his crew know their chronic. Invite us to some Reason parties! Extra points if we can party with Jack Shafer.

So different pot has different potencies. This has always been true, or I have read. But consider that the figures that NIDA quotes rely on research from the University of Mississippi's Marijuana Potency Project. As Gary Greenberg reported in MoJo back in 2005, NIDA grows pot at Ole Missa partnership that forms the only legal producer of marijuana in the U.S. (and an irony I'll leave to fellow fans of Terry Southern to mull over). Ole Miss bases this particular batch of research on "59,369 samples of cannabis, 1,225 hashish samples, and 443 hash oil samples" that have been confiscated since 1975.

(Wait just a minute, what about the aforementioned pot from the 60s and [half of] the 70s?)

But while 62K-odd samples of weed sounds like a lot and all, what of NIDA/Ole Miss' ability to assess potency? As Greenberg points out (in a piece on the affect a sprayable form of medical marijuana known as Sativex might have on both sides of the drug debate that is much more serious than this blog post), the anti-drug policies of the government have filtered down to Ole Miss' research, to the point where:

NIDA's brown, stems-and-seeds-laden, low-potency potwhat's known on the streets as "schwag"cannot stack up against the dense green, aromatic, and powerful sinsemilla favored by most medical marijuana patients (and grown by Sativex producer GW). Doblin asked the University of Mississippi to grow the good stuff for him, but they refused, so he approached a botanist at the University of Massachusetts, who applied to the DEA to grow research-grade pot in a 200-square-foot room in the basement of a building in Amherst. This started a whole new kind of collegiate rivalry, the Rebels squaring off against the Minutemen over the quality of their pot. In a letter to the DEA, Mississippi's botanistafter pointing out that no one had ever officially complained about the "adequacy" of their producttrumpeted recently acquired "custom-manufactured deseeding equipment" and a new stock of seeds that had allowed Ole Miss to amass more than 50,000 joints' worth of a "special batch" of high-potency, smooth-smoking weed.Three and a half years after UMass kicked off the battleand only after a judge ordered the feds to make their decisionthe Rebels prevailed, its monopoly preserved when the DEA denied UMass the license necessary to grow pot legally.

Ya gots to love the fight for government grants. In any case, the feds have taken their potency data and used it to craft a film called "The Purple Brain" (purple being the 2.0 version of Maui wowie), which NORML is callingReefer Madness 2.0.

As in so many things these days, one wishes for something approximating independent analysis. I don't trust the government's research on drugs; its hyperbole and scare tactics on pot in particular seemed design to defend status quos (border and prison policies) that worsen, not solve, larger societal problems at hand. Nor do I trust NORML et al, even, and perhaps especially, when, having gotten nowhere on legalization per se, they reframe the issue as a balm for the sick and dying. Allowing medical marijuana is a no-brainer in my book, but I just think it's a little unseemly when perfectly healthy pot-positive types hide behind AIDS and cancer patients.

The problem is that as long as the government forbids most independent marijuana studiesby limiting the ability to get the stuff legallywe're likely to remain buffeted by agendas, not guided by science.

But meanwhile, don't those confiscated samples of pot providing some kind of trend line seem fishy on its face? Any statisticians out there?

Poison pills, mafiosos, casinos, and Cubasound like the plot of a mobster flick? Nope. How about the elements of the CIA's plot to assassinate Fidel Castro that began in 1960? Shady dealings carried out by the U.S. intelligence agency surfaced decades ago through leaks and disclosures made to the Church Committee, but today we get the full 702-page story. With the declassification of the "family jewels"an internal accounting done in the wake of Watergate to document a quarter century of nefarious activities that were "outside the legislative charter" of the CIAcomes the indisputable proof that CIA leadership oversaw years of murderous schemes, kidnapping, domestic spying, and human experimentation.

Last week, CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden called the release "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency." But it makes you wonder what the U.S. government will be releasing forty years from now. Probably then the revelations will be less like the Godfather and more like a creepy Orwellian thriller.